IT & Network Infrastructure : IBM`s Watson: 16 Things You May Not Know About Its Hardware Muscle

IBM's Watson: 16 Things You May Not Know About Its Hardware Muscle

by Darryl K. Taft

Power 750

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, all running the Linux operating system. The Power 750 is commercially available and is being used by customers around the world today.

Performance

Watson contains 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,870 processor cores. It can operate at 80 teraflops (80 trillion operations) per second.

Real Time

POWER7 has the computing power to process an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while allowing for real-time analysis. This enables the massively parallel analytical capabilities Watson needs to match the speed at which Jeopardy contestants must decipher clues and provide accurate responses through analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities of natural language.

Data Store

The entire Watson data store resides in memory in order to achieve the sub-3-second response time needed for Jeopardy. The large memory support of Power systems enables the development of high-performance, workload-optimized applications. Watson was not connected to the Internet during Jeopardy